Andrew Duehren

that the president had brought immediately just raised all sorts of questions about the conflict of interest inherent in such a situation where President Trump is obviously controlling the private lawyers that he hired to bring this suit against the government.

But he is also, to a very unusual degree, controlling the lawyers who are supposed to respond to this suit.

Yeah, I mean, it's just there are two sides to the case, but Donald Trump sits on top of both parties in this lawsuit.

And so in that sense, while federal law does allow for people to bring these types of lawsuits against the IRS, this case raises profound questions about what the outcome would be and whether there would be a real defense of the suit and whether the Justice Department would contest what President Trump was claiming in his lawsuit against the IRS.

Basically, given all of these tangled web of conflicts between President Trump and the Justice Department and the conflict of interest between lawyers who are working for the president in a private capacity and the lawyers who are working for him under the federal government, the judge starts to worry that this lawsuit can't proceed.

There's a legal principle that the two sides in a lawsuit have to actually be in conflict with each other, that you can't sue yourself or sue your friend and hope to go manufacture a favorable legal ruling from a judge that will benefit both sides, that there has to be a genuine tension between the two parties in a lawsuit or else the judge has to throw it out.

The judge can say, I can't rule on this because it's not a real lawsuit, essentially.

And so the judge...

was questioning whether a real lawsuit even existed here.

And so she asked the Justice Department and President Trump's lawyers to write briefs, they were supposed to be due today, explaining themselves and telling her, are you actually fighting with each other or is this kind of all a charade and you have filed this lawsuit essentially under false pretenses, in which case the judge could have dismissed it.

And she was indicating that she was certainly considering

just throwing it out entirely.

Yeah, yes.

And the Justice Department was going to have to explain that.

And doing so would have potentially been very awkward because for them to say that this lawsuit should exist, they would have had to show their face in this case and say, here I am to oppose the president's claims, which people at the Justice Department, especially this Justice Department, didn't want to do.

Yes, exactly.

And so folks within the administration were working feverishly last week to avoid that scenario and to avoid potentially embarrassing ruling from the judge.

And what they arrived at was that President Trump would drop his lawsuit entirely.

And in exchange, the Justice Department would create this unprecedented, gigantic pot of taxpayer money that the Justice Department will control to compensate victims of, quote unquote, weaponization.

Yeah, so we don't know everything yet, but what we do know is that this will be $1,776,000,000.